Has the UK jumped the gun in scrapping free Covid tests? With the pandemic seemingly behind us, the Government is now making us pay for testing. But has it miscalculated? By Ivor Campbell
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t the start of this year, we were among the first to pick up on a leaked government suggestion that free lateral flow testing to detect Covid among the UK population would soon end. That has now become a reality, despite initial denials by ministers. The Johnston administration has already spent £6billion, allowing Britons to claim up to seven tests a day without charge, and plainly this was not a money tree that could continue to shed its harvest indefinitely. The Government’s winter Covid plan apparently included a provision to limit free tests to high-risk settings such as care homes, hospitals, schools, and people with symptoms, with the cost of future mass testing borne by individuals and businesses rather than the public purse. Education Secretary Nadim Zahawi (pictured inset) initially rebutted the idea, insisting that scrapping free tests ‘is not where we are at,’ using the sort of ambiguous language, so favoured by this Government, that has you reaching for the number of a good lawyer. Perhaps Zahawi hadn’t been told of the plan; perhaps he didn’t want to answer any more questions about it. Whatever the reason, it was no surprise when the change was pushed through and that, after all, is the point of floating unpopular measures in advance, through unnamed sources. What was more surprising – shocking even – was that, with the notable exception of Nicola Sturgeon, The Scottish First Minister, no one seemed remotely bothered by the suggestion. We warned at the time that anyone who wanted to know what could happen following the imposition of a mandatory testing programme on a population, with only the free market left to decide on incidental issues like cost and distribution, need look no farther than the United States. There, a ‘wild west’ evolved in the first year of the pandemic, as labs and testing facilities were free to charge whatever the market would bear for tests that we take for granted, fuelling a multi-billion-dollar industry. Earlier this year, the US-based Consumer Report website warned: “The next time you get tested for Covid-19, it might cost $130, $385, or no money at all.
TESTING TIMES: As the cost of living crisis bites, Britons are now having to pay for lateral flow tests, main. In the US, President Joe Biden, below, has expanded the availability of publicly funded test kits
“Some labs tack on additional fees such as those for ‘specimen collection’—the act of inserting a cotton-tipped plastic swab in your nose for a few seconds. Others may even bundle together several tests for almost a thousand dollars.” With regulations that allow pop-up companies with no healthcare experience to offer rapid testing, limited supplies of tests are snapped-up and sold on for huge profits. Just as the UK government was planning the ending the free supply of lateral flow tests, the Biden administration belatedly changed tack. In January, the poorest Americans had tests delivered to their homes for the first time, and those with health insurance got the cost of their
at-home tests reimbursed. As attention switched in the previous 12 month from testing to the rollout of the vaccination programme, the emergence of the Omicron variant brought it sharply back into focus. In the early stages of the pandemic, the diagnostics industry appeared to believe there would be a future need for sophisticated, rapid-testing hardware. Instead, the highest revenues and profits were in the mass production of relatively low tech, at-home disease screening kits. While the UK government is to be commended for being on the front foot with the rollout of vaccines, it has been less successful in helping British companies benefit from this mass testing market growth. To date, the biggest winner has been private equity-backed Innova
Medical, which won £3.7bn in UK government contracts, despite its Chinese-manufactured lateral flow tests being recalled by the US Food and Drug Administration after they failed to provide acceptable reliability data. A senior diagnostics industry figure recently told me that he’d been in conversation with our Prime Minister, who left him with the impression that he thought British companies supplied all of the Covid testing kits used in the UK. Mr Johnston was apparently unaware that, while Innova Medical might have operations and research and development facilities in the UK,
its base is in California, not Britain. A quick Google search would have told him that, while the company has plans to build a new production facility in Wales, its UK chief executive Daniel Elliott fears it doesn’t have sufficient contracts to make it viable after the company failed to win additional UK government orders. We must learn to live with Covid, so we are told, which also means, presumably, that we must also learn to live with Covid testing. The UK has 13 large providers of lateral flow tests who have formed the Laboratory and Testing Industry Organisation to set and police their own standards. With a strong and
potentially viable manufacturing capacity and a seemingly ongoing demand for its products, both the consumer and producer in this market deserve better support than they appear to be getting from the government. As the sudden emergence of Omicron demonstrated, forecasting demand is problematic, and, like flu, Covid may become seasonal. However, the market for tests is not limited to this country – fewer than one per cent of tests have gone to lower-income countries. As we have become practised in self-testing, future demand may come from tests that distinguish Covid from flu or the common cold. However you look at it, ending free tests would be short-sighted from public health and business perspectives. Ivor Campbell is Chief Executive of Callander-based Snedden Campbell